A personal aside: When Colin De Land died in 2003 at age forty-seven, Artforum titled its tribute to him “Shaggy Dogg.” It was one of the most apt titles the magazine ever came up with. First at Vox Populi, the East Village gallery he opened in the early ’80s on East Sixth Street, then at […]
The real story out of Kazakhstan isn’t Borat, it’s oil. No sooner did this sprawling Central Asian state declare independence in 1991 than foreign investors began jockeying for a piece of the action. But for the excitable Arkansan heading there to meet his mail-order bride at the start of Christopher Robbins’s engaging if somewhat starry-eyed travelogue Apples Are from Kazakhstan, the place still smacks more of myth than of reality. “That country’s got gold and every other metal, and more oil than the Arabs. And they’re building a shiny new capital out in the middle of the prairie, pretty as
It’s hard not to wonder whether anyone back in the mid-1980s—when Don DeLillo was busy crafting White Noise’s Jack Gladney, the wily chairman of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill—could have anticipated that an entire book on the subject of the Hitler salute would someday be published. And yet even a casual visit to the book exhibition at the annual meeting of the German Studies Association, where a small army of swastikas can be found goose-stepping across dust jackets as if choreographed for Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler,” would have suggested that it was far from unimaginable. Indeed, the natural counterpart
In 2003, the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Central Park Act, which designated the land we now call Central Park a public place. It was a hidden jewel of a show, tucked away in a corner of the American Wing’s mezzanine, where a viewer could often find herself alone with Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s thrilling drawings for the “Greensward” plan, as well as lesser-known entries in the 1857 competition for the park’s design. (My favorite: John Rink’s sublimely kooky “Competition Entry No. 4,” which appears less like landscape design than
Sloane Crosley is at that age at which you’re old enough to realize that it’s not all about you but young enough to suspect that the majority of it must be. Fortunately for readers of I Was Told There’d Be Cake, her collection of essays, she’s also smart enough to know that if it’s going to be about her, it needs to be surprising, entertaining, and sometimes moving. If Crosley is going to use her life as a launching pad for discussing oft-considered issues like the boss from hell, the torment of being a bridesmaid, and the horrors of moving
Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: for a week of debates and roundtables around the theme “The Novel, what an invention!”397398
Michael Angarano as Arthur Parkinson and Olivia Thirlby as Lila Raybern in Snow Angels, directed by David Gordon Green, 2008 DAVID GORDON GREEN’S haunting and melancholy drama Snow Angels stands alongside his earlier George Washington (2000) and All the Real Girls (2003) as yet another of the young director’s very personal, uniquely big-hearted portraits of […]
In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an extraordinary photo came to light. Taken in 1971, it’s a holiday snapshot showing the Saudi bin Laden family on vacation in Sweden. There they are, twenty-two of them, with a healthy complement of brothers and sisters ranging from toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, posing in front of a big pink car, grinning and laughing, resplendent in crazy-patterned bell-bottoms and loud shirts. How could this family, looking so characteristic of its ’70s heyday—so Westernized, so likable, so much like us—have spawned the most virulent anti-American terrorist on earth?
Boris Groys has been working in the gap between art and philosophy for more than thirty years. Born in East Berlin in 1947, educated in the Soviet Union, and active as a critic in Moscow’s underground art scene in the ’70s, he emigrated to West Germany in 1981, eventually receiving a doctorate in philosophy. In recent years, he has lectured on art, literature, media theory, and philosophy at New York University and the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, while pursuing an increasing number of curatorial and art projects. Well known in eastern and central Europe, his books
As we were saying, the New York School can be described and redescribed through the coteries that it comprised—this, at least, seems to be the working assumption of recent books on the subject. In its day, the currency of the New York School was gossip; now we read of cliques, of an expanded field, of mutable social frames, or, as in Maggie Nelson’s account, of gender. Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions is the promising title of a caprice that moves restlessly among these key terms while acknowledging the contributions made by the women poets whose work
But much of the time she felt good. . . . It was as if the conflagration of her bouts with Karim had cast a special light on everything, a dawn light after a life lived in twilight. It was as if she had been born deficient and only now been gifted the missing sense.
If Kenneth Goldsmith were writing this column—well, for starters, he wouldn’t write it; he’d turn in a piece of found art that had nothing to do with anybody’s book collection, or he’d transcribe our conversation, with all the ums and uhs (mostly mine—he’s on the Oscar Wilde end of the articulateness spectrum), or he’d plagiarize […]
Ron Hansen is an outlaw among outlaws—and not just because his first two novels, Desperadoes (1979), about the Dalton Gang, and the pen/Faulkner-nominated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), reimagined the Wild West. As a practicing Jesuit (he serves as deacon in his San Jose congregation) who embraces his faith, he is a lone rider in a largely secular literary world, integrating themes of morality, grace, suffering, redemption, and resurrection into his work while respecting the fiction writer’s oath of withholding judgment. In fact, not until the best-selling Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) did he dare
Thirty-five years ago, Stephen Shore set out from Manhattan on a road trip to photograph America. In addition to taking photos that would begin to form his series Uncommon Places, he recorded the details of what would become a near-legendary journey. On the anniversary this summer of the six-week expedition, Phaidon is publishing A Road Trip Journal ($250), a limited-edition facsimile of Shore’s documentation, photographic and otherwise. (The press has also just released an engaging and thorough survey book on the photographer as part of its Contemporary Artists monograph series.) The work featured in this new volume was made with
A film professor I had in college, a hard-core Jesuit who swore by Doris Day, had convinced himself that she was the greatest actress in Hollywood history. The reasoning went something like this: She 1) was conversant in all genres, 2) was an accomplished actress, singer, and dancer, and 3) projected a complex persona that was demure but with an undercurrent of feline menace. It annoyed me to no end. For any young and precious cineast, Day was not a subject for serious inquiry, as were, say, the Nouvelle Vague and Buster Keaton. But everyone who took that class—the History
In form, Human Smoke is unique. Nicholson Baker seeks to tell the story of the origins of World War II through a chronological sequence of several hundred vignettes, as if one were to screen Gone with the Wind through a series of uncaptioned snapshots. Yet however impressionistic Baker’s technique may seem, he is pursuing an ambitious and sweeping reinterpretation of his subject: He evidently regards the “good war” as bad, a colossal mistake. In other words, Baker is tilting against the most deeply settled and ardently embraced piece of conventional wisdom in the current armory of American myth. His prime
Is Tintin literature? It’s a good question, and one that launches novelist Tom McCarthy’s book-length study of the Belgian artist Hergé’s masterwork, the adventures of the boy reporter with the comma-shaped hairdo. The French have already made up their minds about Tintin’s literary merit: McCarthy’s bibliography lists works by the playwright and academic Jean-Marie Apostolidès and the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, as well as the philosopher Michel Serres’s multivolume Hermès, a chapter of which is devoted to Hergé’s 1963 album, The Castafiore Emerald. (One might add to this list Thomas Sertillanges’s odd La Vie quotidienne à Moulinsart, which considers Tintin less
In general, we don’t enjoy hearing about other people’s illnesses. If you say, “How are you?” to an acquaintance or a new friend, you want to get back a pat “Fine,” not some lengthy disquisition on the latest ache or pain. The exception to this rule occurs when both people have something wrong with them: In that case, a person is willing to listen for a while so that he can later work off his own complaints. (The late Gardner Botsford called such encounters among his old-men circle of friends “organ recitals.”)
During the 2003 Adorno centenary, something remarkable happened in Germany. The entire nation reached out to embrace this renegade Marxist philosopher in ways that were truly surprising. Throughout the country, Adorno “festivals” took place—apotheoses of the public celebrations advocated in Rousseauesque “civil religion.” In Frankfurt-am-Main, where Adorno taught and where he remains something of a legend, there is now an Adorno-Platz that features, instead of the customary bust, his writing desk, bizarrely encased in glass. A plethora of public exhibitions tracing his life and thought were mounted. Concerts featuring his musical compositions—most of which resemble Vienna School pastiches—were widely staged
On August 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon gave the first speech outlining his domestic program. Its centerpiece was legislation proposing a federal income floor of sixteen hundred dollars for every American family—in today’s money, almost ten thousand dollars. In this, Nixon’s perpetually active political antennae were failing him; seven months earlier, Gallup had asked its sample, “Would you favor or oppose such a plan?” and 62 percent were against it. But the idea of a “guaranteed minimum income” then commanded such great assent in all the best policy-intellectual circles that this Republican president, elected with the solid support of
